Rachel Philbrick
November 4, 2024
The Newly-formed SCS Data Committee Announces its First Annual Census
In October, you may have seen a SurveyMonkey link to something called an SCS “Census,” perhaps on social media or in an SCS email. (Or maybe you never saw it, and an email is sitting buried in your spam folder right now.) This Census is a new, hopefully annual survey created by the SCS Data Committee to learn about everyone who considers themselves part of the community of Classical Studies in any capacity. We hope you will participate in the Census and help the work of the Society and its officers. You do not need to be an active SCS member to complete the Census.
Seated in January 2023, the Data Committee is the newest part of the SCS governance structure. Over the years, the SCS has collected various data (housed under the Research tab on its website), though in a somewhat ad hoc way. No single committee existed to centrally organize, update, and publicize data about our field. This is now the purview of the Data Committee.
Driving the creation of the Data Committee was a pressing need for a bigger — and reliably updated — picture of the field of Classical Studies in the U.S. and Canada. So this year, the Committee took on the development of a survey to learn more about all of us, which we hope will become an annual event providing a year-by-year snapshot of our community: who we are, how we are feeling, and what issues are most pressing.
To develop the Census, we began this spring by polling SCS committee chairs to see what types of data would be most useful to them and their work. The responses were unambiguous: committee chairs wanted to know about the demographics and the careers of their constituents. With this mandate, the Data Committee worked over the summer to develop a survey that would provide usable demographic and career data. We wrote questions that could be asked again in future iterations of the census, to allow us to chart changes over time.
We decided to call it a “census” because, like the U.S. Census, this survey has the mission to provide timely, accurate, and actionable information about the field to its members, including decision-makers at all levels.
A census is most powerful when it counts everyone, and we hope you will participate. We know we are asking for your time and attention during a very busy part of the year. Many of you have also recently carved out time in your packed day to fill out your SCS ballot. The Census is a complement to those votes. The information you provide in the Census will help guide the plans and actions of the Society’s governing bodies.
Here is our brief pitch for completing the Census (for those of you skimming this post):
· Make your voice heard: tell us about yourself and what matters to you. We extend a particular invitation to anyone who feels their voice is often not heard in the field.
· Your anonymous and confidential responses will provide vital information to the SCS that will inform future decision-making.
· The survey will take less than 10 minutes for most people to complete.
· We will present trends and aggregated data to you at the 2025 Annual Meeting, so you can also see where we are as a field.
Our goal is to log 2,000 responses by November 22, when the survey closes. We encourage you to send the SurveyMonkey link to other people you know who are engaged in any way in Classical Studies: undergraduate and graduate students; K-12 teachers; part-time instructors; independent scholars; professors emeriti; members of your graduate school cohort who have since gone into finance; members of your book club. As mentioned above, SCS membership is not needed to participate.
The Data Committee will present initial, aggregated results at a hybrid one-hour open meeting at the SCS Annual Meeting this coming January. We hope many of you will attend, see what we have learned from the Census, and ask questions. We will also share the other projects that we have been working on: an updated, searchable database of over 1,800 completed doctoral dissertations and a new, analyzable database of all SCS job ads since 1997. We believe these databases, along with the Census data, will provide profound and actionable insights into our field.
You can fill out the Census here. If you have questions or concerns, you can write to us at SCSDataCommittee@gmail.com. This is the first time the SCS has conducted such a large-scale survey, and we welcome feedback. Some early responders brought our attention to a couple of issues, which we were able to address during the first 24 hours. As we look ahead to future surveys, we are learning from this initial experience. Thanks, and we hope to see you in January.
Rachel Philbrick, Chair
On behalf of the Data Committee:
Del Maticic
Patrick Burns
Ruth Scodel
Robert Groves
Clinton Kinkade
Mali Skotheim
Jen Ebbeler
Greg Crane
David Potter
Emma Dench
Header image: Peter Brueghels, The Census at Bethlehem, 1566. Oil on wood panel. Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Belgium. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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